Mum, Catholic, said, "You should never hate a person. Hate what they do."
I failed.
//
It never occurred to Trixie that her friendship to me was lousy. That she expected beyond reason. That I was exhausted with caring and that my exhaustion was contagious.
She had the escape route few women had. An excellent job. You might even use the term career. Luck and and talent. Not education. She went through her life proclaiming, "You don't need to go to college to do that." It was her brag. Her conceit.
Most people do.
In my innocent loyalty, I did not realize she was jealous. That she thought all women were competitive with each other. That nothing mattered more to her than the admiration of men. That she saw other women as enemies more so than friends. That she was a Lady Against Women. And that as Lady Boss she was despised.
Teenage Trixie told our young artist crowd, "Those feminists are crazy." Her eyes flashed at the eyes of the most macho, sexist man among us, a man seething with masculinity, dark and handsome as a matinee idol. A flirt. His ego burnished.
Walking along the streets in a university town with just one other man, a plain one, who'd been there, he said, "So you're a feminist. You're feminine though."
//
The literature teacher asked, "In this poem when you read "the fog came in on cats feet" what does he mean?
//
Trixie and me on a single girls beach vacation. "Next summer I hope I'll be here with my husband," she said even though she wasn't dating anyone.
But then, in those years when post college people with a couple years of job started finding The Right One, when Right Ones were everywhere, she did too. He asked her to marry him on their sixth date. And she dropped out of my life as suddenly, too busy in her year long engagement to care about our friendship. Only to call me crying - long distance - that her mum was against the marriage and trying to stop the wedding.
Angrily her mum said to me, "I wasn't born yesterday."
//
How many fingers have I raised?
//
The wedding was just family. I wasn't invited.
I sent a gift.
//
Her husband was uncommonly timelessly handsome from every angle. She was healthy like a horse. He made good money. She made good money. He invested hers. He made purchases without her knowledge or permission. He took off on weekends that didn't include her. He left her alone and vulnerable. He accused her of giving him a rash.
Her calls to me became more frequent. We stayed on longer. I never avoided her calls. But I began to realize that each call was her reportage of an affair she was having or, I should say, an affair she imagined she was having. A man at her job was the recipient of her flashing eyes. Everyone at the office could see. And some of them admired the man for, well, getting into Lady Boss's pants. That was his brag. His conceit.
Every call was her begging me to give her small hope by seeing small details with an optimism I was not feeling. I rewrote and retold her story to her several times.
Another friend told me I shouldn't take her calls. That I was an enabler. A what?
Long-distance, I realized. Her husband wasn't just using her for her money. He was using her for cover. He had thrown her to another man while he lived a secret life. She kept saying her husband was "perfectly good" but he needed - I wasn't there - to be with another man. Married, he passed.
I hated him.
//
She became Obsessed with the man at work. Whatever had happened once, they weren't dating. It was as simple as that. Bad boy of the office. Recipient of flash.
He smiled because he was the type of person who did, especially when it came to his Lady Boss. Some of the women there laughed at her behind her back when they thought of the way she comported herself around the office, imagining him - a lump - on top of Mrs. Smarty Pants.
Was I an enabler?
One day she introduced me to the lump. Unsightly.
He made a pass at me.
He was disgusting.
She hated me for that.
//
Note: Trixie never got out of the bind she was in - her marriage - while she was alive. She continued to live a lie because she didn't want her mother to say, "I Told You So." Before she died, she told people she was a writer and a blogger. Just like me.
